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About this blog

Atari® XP Syndicated News Feed

Atari® XP is a publisher of collectible, physical games beginning with never-released and rare Atari games from the 1970s and 1980s. 

All our game cartridges are newly made in the United States of high-quality materials and manufactured to exacting standards. Limited edition versions will include premium packaging and extras that will delight collectors and fans of the titles.

Games that were completed but never received an official release, or were only released in very limited quantities. 

Games for which physical media has become extremely rare, and therefore hard to find. 

A wide variety of classic games that would benefit from small improvements to graphic rendering on modern devices and the smoothness and accuracy of controls. These games will be carefully ‘reconditioned’ and then re-released. 

The AtariXP name is a tribute to the Atari Program Exchange (APX), which sold software through a mail order catalog in the 1970s and 1980s. The quarterly APX catalog had a loyal following of owners of Atari's 8-bit home computers. 

APX encouraged both professional and amateur programmers to submit software to be considered for commercial distribution, and by doing so encouraged a wave of game and application development. That spirit lives on in the retro hardware and homebrew development community.

Entries in this blog

Why wasn’t the Game Aquaventure Released?

Martin Goldberg is a veteran game industry developer, writer, archiver, and historian who is well known and respected in the Atari community. Marty’s articles can be found in many gaming publications, and he co-authored Atari Inc. Business is Fun, A Complete History of Atar Inc. in collaboration with Curt Vendel as part of their effort to preserve Atari history with their Atari Museum archive.   The period during which Aquaventure is thought to have been under development was one o

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Why is the identity of developers behind early video games sometimes a mystery?

Matt Reichert is the expert on Atari prototypes, and he maintains atariprotos.com, a website dedicated to documenting these unfinished and unreleased games. His thorough research and detailed game reviews are important to the Atari community, and impressive. Gamers today are accustomed to long elaborate credit sequences, but what they may not know is that sharing the names of the individuals who created games was not the norm.  Until the mid 1980s, most games were only credited to the c

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The search for the developer of Aquavanture

Matt Reichert is the expert on Atari prototypes, and he maintains atariprotos.com, a website dedicated to documenting these unfinished and unreleased games. His thorough research and detailed game reviews are important to the Atari community, and impressive. The origins of the original Aquaventure prototype are a bit hazy.  It is thought to have been discovered by a collector at a flea market in central Florida in the mid 1990s.  Eventually, this collector brought the prototype to a gami

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The Aquaventure Mystery Solved?

Matt Reichert is the expert on Atari prototypes, and he maintains atariprotos.com, a website dedicated to documenting these unfinished and unreleased games. His thorough research and detailed game reviews are important to the Atari community, and impressive. I’ve explored several different possibilities on the identity of the programmer(s) of Aquaventure. Interviews with Gary Shannon and Tod Frye made it clear that they were both involved, while an analysis of the code indicated that Nic

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The Aquaventure Mystery Deepens

Matt Reichert is the expert on Atari prototypes, and he maintains atariprotos.com, a website dedicated to documenting these unfinished and unreleased games. His thorough research and detailed game reviews are important to the Atari community, and impressive. Matt took the time to share his research on the origins of Aquavanture, one of the three prototypes Atari XP is launching on cartridge. We know that Gary Shannon and Tod Frye each played a part in programming Aquaventure. There may h

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Inside the Cartridge: The New Atari 2600 PCB

When Atari was creating games in the 70’s and 80’s, every title was programmed to work with a specific configuration of processors and memory that were called “Mappers”, and over the years, these configurations changed as developers pushed the Atari 2600 hardware to the absolute limit of its capabilities. When we started the Atari XP project, we recognized that re-releasing a wide variety of titles would require making PCB with many different configurations. From a manufacturing perspective, t

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Howard Scott Warshaw Discusses Saboteur

The team at Atari recently asked legendary game designer Howard Scott Warshaw some questions about Saboteur, and the connections between Saboteur and Yar’s Revenge. Q: What’s up with the Yar in Saboteur? HSW: That’s a good question. Perhaps a better question is: What’s the Yar up to in Saboteur? You will note the Yar contributes to the building of the rocket transport, but it is not clear what exactly that Yar is contributing. Remember this: You can take the Yar out of Saboteur

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Discover: Then and Now

Welcome to Atari XP Discovery! Watch this space – this is where the team will reveal exclusive content from old Atari game developers, discuss the new games that we’re developing for our legacy consoles, uncover the rich history of Atari, and maybe even drop a few Easter Eggs about our upcoming releases. If that sounds like fun, you’re in the right place. If that sounds terrible, please sign up for our mailing list so that we can bother you until you love it. - The Atari Team

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Dennis Debro Shares His Experience Working on Yars' Return

The team at Atari recently asked Dennis Debro some questions about the development of Yars' Return. Dennis Debro worked with Curt Vendel on the development of the Yars’ Return. He also contributed to the Atari XP release, digging into the code to make some refinements. Q: How did you get involved with the development of Yars’ Return? DD: Curt Vendel and his team at Legacy Engineering had a contract with Atari to produce the Atari Flashback 2. I worked on the game Atari Climber, one

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Aquaventure’s Pirate Links

In Aquaventure you play as a deep sea treasure hunter, desperate for one big score to make your name, and your fortune. Your crew believes it has discovered the shipwreck of the notorious pirate Calico Blue, and his lost treasure. We couldn’t find any reference to a real life Calico Blue, but there was a Calico Jack. Calico Jack was an English pirate captain named Jack Rackham who sailed in the Bahamas in the early 1700s. His nickname was apparently derived from the clothing he wore. Calico

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